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The only actual reason I'm putting in those obscure references (disregarding the times I do it completely subconsciously) [in ATOM] is because the popular saying "People are alive as long as they are remembered" really hits home with me for some reason and I want to prolong the lives of things I like through it.

Binky AOD is something of a refutation of the Fury Road / Fallout vision of the apocalypse as something that will bring about a bright new world in which rugged frontierfolk will create utopias (after dealing with the trollish remnants of the world that mostly perished in fire); those basically say, "If all the world were reduced to frontier days, the best qualities would emerge from a mix of benevolent men and feisty women to bring about the idealized frontier image of Little House on the Prairie or Giants in the Earth." AOD says, "If all the world were reduced to frontier days, human greed, fear, shortsightedness, seflishness, and clannishness would push us the rest of the way to extinction." The inspiring (?) message of AOD is that you shouldn't think that the reset button can solve the world's problems; you ought to fix and save the world we have.

Classic games journolol, writing about games they don't understand on a platform they don't care about for an audience they despise out of a sense of misplaced superiority. All that because no conventional media company will hire them for their writing.

the reason why 'fallout' is so 'popular' in Russia: It's not really Fallout as a franchise but rather the story of a world that has been destroyed. The one without any sense of direction or substantive replacement for the things that are gone now.

As I see it, it's mostly an unconscious feeling that has to do with USSR's dissolution and Perestroika. 'Russian fallout' is usually a setting soaked in Soviet nostalgia and the signifier of the era past. Usually, nobody is rebuilding anything in it. People are kinda caught in the perpetual state of trance, reliving the realities of the time long gone (agitprop, social realism, the elements of everyday life).

Psychologically, it's a much deeper topic than the western postapoc. For Russia, apocalypse was very much real, and they're still getting over it. It's too early to let the history go and move on. Until then, people are gonna cherish these ruins, an epoch done and gone. While Fallout is a trauma gotten from a threat of nuclear annihilation (hence Fallout's more rational and detached approach), things like ATOM or You Are Empty are the result of a very real trauma, the annihilation of the Soviet world. And since it was not very 'tangible' an annihilation (in the sense that the cultural death is not as tangible as the one caused by nuclear explosions), the consequences are more rooted in culture, art, and the psychology of people that are shaped by said art.

1.) I want a game almost exactly like the old ones. Even all the UI quirks, gameplay, MIDI sound/music and artstyle of that era.

2.) I want a game very sinilar to the old ones, but I’m ok with some modern touches like 3D graphics, better UI, etc.

3.) I want a spirirtual sucessor that captures a lot of the feelz and lore of the old games but expands the gameplay and switches up the formula to not only modernize it but push the boundaries of design as if the series still continued today.

These groups of people have and will always exist. The only difference with kickstarter is that all three will have given money in advance for the thing they want. So naturally you’re going to get butthurt no matter what.

Conservative [game] industry abandons old shit on the road all the time, when they feel that good parts of it are not worth the effort. Then kickstarters try to play nostalgia card and revive it, yet the things just crumble in their hands into a dust as if people never understood why these things worked

Yeat at the same time, people who do understand why these things worked manage to make them spring to life because they loved them for reals and have real passion.

Understand this, the Dark Side's true power is not in that it allowed Palpatine to hide his presence while holding regular meetings with the Jedi High Council. It lies in the fact that it allowed him to maintain his composure and not laugh in their faces.

Ok guys, fun's over. This topic is getting too heated and people are clearly divulging information not intended for us. As a site, we have a duty to uphold good relations with developers so that we can all work together and have the kind of fun games that we all...

Oh wait, this is the Codex. Sorry, forgot for a minute there. Thought this was NeoGaf or something for a minute.

We're all struggling in the same tar-pit, we're all tar-splattered, and we'll probably all sink, but we have no hope at all unless we spend our energies helping ourselves and others rather than shoving each other down deeper.

[anti-colonial and Communist] revolutions tend to end in disaster for the people and the land irrespective of the moral justification at the outset because the skillset needed to throw off a more powerful oppressor is almost entirely different from, and even exclusive of, the skillset needed to build a political order.

Some of us actually like their hobbies and enjoy good games - including the challenge on the way - not just completing them like addicted junkies who just want to +1 their prestigious gaming experience. The Void was made to be enjoyed, and I enjoyed it the first three times even though I failed miserably until I actually learned how to play. Learning is part of the fun in this game, just like in many others. Do you also bitch how shit Dwarf Fortress is because you didn't win the game when you tried? Or that you didn't finish Crusader Kings 2 because not only you did not manage to conquer the whole world and convert everyone, but also you were thrown to prison, and died?

If people like their games casual and easy, fine, I can understand not everyone likes challenge. However, when you say something like "Games are meant to be finished" telling others their ways of enjoyment are wrong and games should be done to YOUR liking, because you are the only one who gets it right, then you are an idiot. I played D:OS three times but never actually finished it - even though the first time I reached the end boss. End fight was boring shit, so I just stopped playing. I could finish the game within 15 minutes, but it stopped being fun and I just stopped. Games are not meant to be finished, not for me at least, games are meant to be enjoyed.

The best game writers, like Avellone, know how to leverage the medium to maximize the benefits of agency and complicity

Click to expand...

MRY, from http://www.cshpicone.com/interview-mark-and-vince:
the question with an RPG system – whether it’s inventory management, item variety, crafting, resting, whatever – is whether it gives the player interesting, meaningful, and enjoyable ways to engage with the game. If a mechanic doesn’t, if it only feeds player mania or encourages degenerate play styles (like rest-pre-buff-fight crawling, save-scumming, paper shuffling, shuttling back and forth from town, etc.), it shouldn’t be in the game

all the games that are given as examples and considered well-written by most people on the Codex are games which had just one auteur primarily responsible. PST is recognized as MCAs baby, AoD is VDs baby, Betrayal at Krondor is Hallfords, Geneforge is Vogels, and so on. And I doubt any those guys had professional editors nor did they need them. Much more important seems to me a clear vision for the game as a whole.
[...]
the tl;dr of this post is probably 'too many cooks'.

Coming up with a game that has a clear and consistent vision behind it appears to require either a strong guiding hand of a singular mind or it requires some extremely tight (and perhaps improbable) level of collaboration and converging creative ideas. The former might be impossible today for anything beyond smaller indie games, the latter must be incredibly difficult and thus incredibly rare.

I think the conventional answer is to say that the question ["What's a RPG"] can't be answered in the abstract because it would prejudge the issue should it arise in an actual case or controversy, which naturally would have to be evaluated on its own particular facts. Then when pressed on whether an already-released game is an RPG, I would insist on answering "under established usages." "IGN would call that an RPG, Mr. Senator." "But would you?" "I'm afraid I haven't played it sufficiently to form my own opinion."

By placing the development of the law over a millennium of problems and solutions and solutions to the problems created by the solutions (and cultural and social changes creating new problems addressed with repurposed old solutions amidst the intersection of multiple dispute resolution traditions [civil/anglo-saxon/danelaw]), it really humanized the idiosyncracies and helped me to see the law as a human achievement iterated over generations, like a city or a religion, representing the compromise of a million different perspectives rather than as a failed attempt at perfect organization (a paradigm which I think or project is at the heart of most cynicism about the law).

I find it amusing how many "Anarchists" are employed in often stable, secure jobs. I'm sure there's no connection whatsoever

Click to expand...

99% = Angry at their parents who just want/ed them to work hard and enjoy life. (Grandparents probably escaped from oppression too )

Click to expand...

I once read an article of how Russian punk music is low on talking about the greatness of anarchy vs western punk music and the author speculated that it was due to collapse of the soviet union and the period thereafter and the experience of real anarchy, not sure whether there's any truth to it, but yeah, most anarchists strike me as hilarious naive or just stupid

'Hell, I heard about guys picking up little twelve year old girls on chat rooms. If they can get little girls to meet them in real life just from a chat room, you better believe we'll be able to sell speakers.'

1) The game will contain somewhat more "woke" content than, let's say, The Outer Worlds.
2) It still won't have enough of it to come across as an "SJW game". Few big budget productions are dumb enough to actually go all the way.
3) The people who obsess about such things will fixate on some particular example for a while, then move on.
4) At the end of the day, when people look back at the game and talk about its flaws, the SJW stuff won't be high up on their list of complaints. (See also: BattleTech)
I suppose there is a chance that this game could go full Sweden ala Wolfenstein: The New Colossus, but I don't think that's Paradox's style. They didn't get where they are today by being reckless.

Click to expand...

What worries me is not 1) from your list or the projected consequences you list in 2) 3) and 4), to me it's not a matter of what they add to pander certain people, it's about the interesting and fun ideas that will be filtered out to avoid offending anyone.

Which is bound to happen. Not enough to affect overall quality? Maybe. Hopefully. I suspect we've reached a stage where anybody writing content for any media exerts self-censorship to stay out of trouble , to some degree even not consciously, so it's hard to say why the end result is the way it is.

If there's a common thread to the SJW, it's 'socialism minus class-consciousness'. If you had to sum it up, it's the theory that Michelle Obama is more oppressed than the straight white man that empties her trash can.

Click to expand...

MRY, from https://v1.escapistmagazine.com/art.../issues/issue_100/554-A-Childhood-in-Hyrule.3
designers and players whose formative experience with roleplaying games is Baldur's Gate (or worse, Final Fantasy), not a tabletop adventure, will see the genre in a totally different light than did the designers who made those games in the first place. The designers of early computer roleplaying games drew from memories of collaborative storytelling with friends. They failed to mirror that experience in computer games, and as a result players and designers relying on those games for inspiration have come to think of RPGs as fantasy cartoons wrapped around random numbers.

Apparently root finally had the operation and became the armless, legless, mustachioed figurine xe always felt xe was on the inside. And it's difficult to post a CYOA without arms.

Please do your best to support xer decision and don't make any further assaults on xer gender identity, bigot.

"We’re going to try and make you into a… kkk kkzzh masterpiece." ~ The Voices, Epic
"Man Tiger Pig is mysterious in his ways. He comes and goes like the wind, sometimes as a man, at other times a pig, even occasionally a tiger." ~ Jing, Legend"How they scurry, these humans. They that are archons of the sublunar realm die as any other." ~ The Druj, Dirge
“The touch of the dead eats away at both body and mind.” ~ Unknown Number, Spiral
“No, that wing… that shining halo… it is not a demon,” gasps a mage. “It’s a… it’s a Carnage Pigeon!” ~ High Mage, Overlord
"YOU ARE DEATH. REDEMPTION IS NOT FOR YOU TO FIND." ~ The Occupant Of The Golden Throne, Emperor of Nothing [40k CYOA]

Apparently root finally had the operation and became the armless, legless, mustachioed figurine xe always felt xe was on the inside. And it's difficult to post a CYOA without arms.

Please do your best to support xer decision and don't make any further assaults on xer gender identity, bigot.

Click to expand...

It's his cyoa, he can do whatever he want with it. But it's shitty when you just wanted to read it after the fact. I bookmarked this thread earlier to read when I had the time/inclination and when I opened it to read it tonight, well there was nothing.

The only actual reason I'm putting in those obscure references (disregarding the times I do it completely subconsciously) [in ATOM] is because the popular saying "People are alive as long as they are remembered" really hits home with me for some reason and I want to prolong the lives of things I like through it.

Binky AOD is something of a refutation of the Fury Road / Fallout vision of the apocalypse as something that will bring about a bright new world in which rugged frontierfolk will create utopias (after dealing with the trollish remnants of the world that mostly perished in fire); those basically say, "If all the world were reduced to frontier days, the best qualities would emerge from a mix of benevolent men and feisty women to bring about the idealized frontier image of Little House on the Prairie or Giants in the Earth." AOD says, "If all the world were reduced to frontier days, human greed, fear, shortsightedness, seflishness, and clannishness would push us the rest of the way to extinction." The inspiring (?) message of AOD is that you shouldn't think that the reset button can solve the world's problems; you ought to fix and save the world we have.

Classic games journolol, writing about games they don't understand on a platform they don't care about for an audience they despise out of a sense of misplaced superiority. All that because no conventional media company will hire them for their writing.

the reason why 'fallout' is so 'popular' in Russia: It's not really Fallout as a franchise but rather the story of a world that has been destroyed. The one without any sense of direction or substantive replacement for the things that are gone now.

As I see it, it's mostly an unconscious feeling that has to do with USSR's dissolution and Perestroika. 'Russian fallout' is usually a setting soaked in Soviet nostalgia and the signifier of the era past. Usually, nobody is rebuilding anything in it. People are kinda caught in the perpetual state of trance, reliving the realities of the time long gone (agitprop, social realism, the elements of everyday life).

Psychologically, it's a much deeper topic than the western postapoc. For Russia, apocalypse was very much real, and they're still getting over it. It's too early to let the history go and move on. Until then, people are gonna cherish these ruins, an epoch done and gone. While Fallout is a trauma gotten from a threat of nuclear annihilation (hence Fallout's more rational and detached approach), things like ATOM or You Are Empty are the result of a very real trauma, the annihilation of the Soviet world. And since it was not very 'tangible' an annihilation (in the sense that the cultural death is not as tangible as the one caused by nuclear explosions), the consequences are more rooted in culture, art, and the psychology of people that are shaped by said art.

1.) I want a game almost exactly like the old ones. Even all the UI quirks, gameplay, MIDI sound/music and artstyle of that era.

2.) I want a game very sinilar to the old ones, but I’m ok with some modern touches like 3D graphics, better UI, etc.

3.) I want a spirirtual sucessor that captures a lot of the feelz and lore of the old games but expands the gameplay and switches up the formula to not only modernize it but push the boundaries of design as if the series still continued today.

These groups of people have and will always exist. The only difference with kickstarter is that all three will have given money in advance for the thing they want. So naturally you’re going to get butthurt no matter what.

Conservative [game] industry abandons old shit on the road all the time, when they feel that good parts of it are not worth the effort. Then kickstarters try to play nostalgia card and revive it, yet the things just crumble in their hands into a dust as if people never understood why these things worked

Yeat at the same time, people who do understand why these things worked manage to make them spring to life because they loved them for reals and have real passion.

Understand this, the Dark Side's true power is not in that it allowed Palpatine to hide his presence while holding regular meetings with the Jedi High Council. It lies in the fact that it allowed him to maintain his composure and not laugh in their faces.

Ok guys, fun's over. This topic is getting too heated and people are clearly divulging information not intended for us. As a site, we have a duty to uphold good relations with developers so that we can all work together and have the kind of fun games that we all...

Oh wait, this is the Codex. Sorry, forgot for a minute there. Thought this was NeoGaf or something for a minute.

We're all struggling in the same tar-pit, we're all tar-splattered, and we'll probably all sink, but we have no hope at all unless we spend our energies helping ourselves and others rather than shoving each other down deeper.

[anti-colonial and Communist] revolutions tend to end in disaster for the people and the land irrespective of the moral justification at the outset because the skillset needed to throw off a more powerful oppressor is almost entirely different from, and even exclusive of, the skillset needed to build a political order.

Some of us actually like their hobbies and enjoy good games - including the challenge on the way - not just completing them like addicted junkies who just want to +1 their prestigious gaming experience. The Void was made to be enjoyed, and I enjoyed it the first three times even though I failed miserably until I actually learned how to play. Learning is part of the fun in this game, just like in many others. Do you also bitch how shit Dwarf Fortress is because you didn't win the game when you tried? Or that you didn't finish Crusader Kings 2 because not only you did not manage to conquer the whole world and convert everyone, but also you were thrown to prison, and died?

If people like their games casual and easy, fine, I can understand not everyone likes challenge. However, when you say something like "Games are meant to be finished" telling others their ways of enjoyment are wrong and games should be done to YOUR liking, because you are the only one who gets it right, then you are an idiot. I played D:OS three times but never actually finished it - even though the first time I reached the end boss. End fight was boring shit, so I just stopped playing. I could finish the game within 15 minutes, but it stopped being fun and I just stopped. Games are not meant to be finished, not for me at least, games are meant to be enjoyed.

The best game writers, like Avellone, know how to leverage the medium to maximize the benefits of agency and complicity

Click to expand...

MRY, from http://www.cshpicone.com/interview-mark-and-vince:
the question with an RPG system – whether it’s inventory management, item variety, crafting, resting, whatever – is whether it gives the player interesting, meaningful, and enjoyable ways to engage with the game. If a mechanic doesn’t, if it only feeds player mania or encourages degenerate play styles (like rest-pre-buff-fight crawling, save-scumming, paper shuffling, shuttling back and forth from town, etc.), it shouldn’t be in the game

all the games that are given as examples and considered well-written by most people on the Codex are games which had just one auteur primarily responsible. PST is recognized as MCAs baby, AoD is VDs baby, Betrayal at Krondor is Hallfords, Geneforge is Vogels, and so on. And I doubt any those guys had professional editors nor did they need them. Much more important seems to me a clear vision for the game as a whole.
[...]
the tl;dr of this post is probably 'too many cooks'.

Coming up with a game that has a clear and consistent vision behind it appears to require either a strong guiding hand of a singular mind or it requires some extremely tight (and perhaps improbable) level of collaboration and converging creative ideas. The former might be impossible today for anything beyond smaller indie games, the latter must be incredibly difficult and thus incredibly rare.

I think the conventional answer is to say that the question ["What's a RPG"] can't be answered in the abstract because it would prejudge the issue should it arise in an actual case or controversy, which naturally would have to be evaluated on its own particular facts. Then when pressed on whether an already-released game is an RPG, I would insist on answering "under established usages." "IGN would call that an RPG, Mr. Senator." "But would you?" "I'm afraid I haven't played it sufficiently to form my own opinion."

By placing the development of the law over a millennium of problems and solutions and solutions to the problems created by the solutions (and cultural and social changes creating new problems addressed with repurposed old solutions amidst the intersection of multiple dispute resolution traditions [civil/anglo-saxon/danelaw]), it really humanized the idiosyncracies and helped me to see the law as a human achievement iterated over generations, like a city or a religion, representing the compromise of a million different perspectives rather than as a failed attempt at perfect organization (a paradigm which I think or project is at the heart of most cynicism about the law).

I find it amusing how many "Anarchists" are employed in often stable, secure jobs. I'm sure there's no connection whatsoever

Click to expand...

99% = Angry at their parents who just want/ed them to work hard and enjoy life. (Grandparents probably escaped from oppression too )

Click to expand...

I once read an article of how Russian punk music is low on talking about the greatness of anarchy vs western punk music and the author speculated that it was due to collapse of the soviet union and the period thereafter and the experience of real anarchy, not sure whether there's any truth to it, but yeah, most anarchists strike me as hilarious naive or just stupid

'Hell, I heard about guys picking up little twelve year old girls on chat rooms. If they can get little girls to meet them in real life just from a chat room, you better believe we'll be able to sell speakers.'

1) The game will contain somewhat more "woke" content than, let's say, The Outer Worlds.
2) It still won't have enough of it to come across as an "SJW game". Few big budget productions are dumb enough to actually go all the way.
3) The people who obsess about such things will fixate on some particular example for a while, then move on.
4) At the end of the day, when people look back at the game and talk about its flaws, the SJW stuff won't be high up on their list of complaints. (See also: BattleTech)
I suppose there is a chance that this game could go full Sweden ala Wolfenstein: The New Colossus, but I don't think that's Paradox's style. They didn't get where they are today by being reckless.

Click to expand...

What worries me is not 1) from your list or the projected consequences you list in 2) 3) and 4), to me it's not a matter of what they add to pander certain people, it's about the interesting and fun ideas that will be filtered out to avoid offending anyone.

Which is bound to happen. Not enough to affect overall quality? Maybe. Hopefully. I suspect we've reached a stage where anybody writing content for any media exerts self-censorship to stay out of trouble , to some degree even not consciously, so it's hard to say why the end result is the way it is.

If there's a common thread to the SJW, it's 'socialism minus class-consciousness'. If you had to sum it up, it's the theory that Michelle Obama is more oppressed than the straight white man that empties her trash can.

Click to expand...

MRY, from https://v1.escapistmagazine.com/art.../issues/issue_100/554-A-Childhood-in-Hyrule.3
designers and players whose formative experience with roleplaying games is Baldur's Gate (or worse, Final Fantasy), not a tabletop adventure, will see the genre in a totally different light than did the designers who made those games in the first place. The designers of early computer roleplaying games drew from memories of collaborative storytelling with friends. They failed to mirror that experience in computer games, and as a result players and designers relying on those games for inspiration have come to think of RPGs as fantasy cartoons wrapped around random numbers.

It's his cyoa, he can do whatever he want with it. But it's shitty when you just wanted to read it after the fact. I bookmarked this thread earlier to read when I had the time/inclination and when I opened it to read it tonight, well there was nothing.

Click to expand...

Welcome to most of the CYOAs here. If you want some finished CYOAs, check Epic and Legend in my signature.

"We’re going to try and make you into a… kkk kkzzh masterpiece." ~ The Voices, Epic
"Man Tiger Pig is mysterious in his ways. He comes and goes like the wind, sometimes as a man, at other times a pig, even occasionally a tiger." ~ Jing, Legend"How they scurry, these humans. They that are archons of the sublunar realm die as any other." ~ The Druj, Dirge
“The touch of the dead eats away at both body and mind.” ~ Unknown Number, Spiral
“No, that wing… that shining halo… it is not a demon,” gasps a mage. “It’s a… it’s a Carnage Pigeon!” ~ High Mage, Overlord
"YOU ARE DEATH. REDEMPTION IS NOT FOR YOU TO FIND." ~ The Occupant Of The Golden Throne, Emperor of Nothing [40k CYOA]

The only actual reason I'm putting in those obscure references (disregarding the times I do it completely subconsciously) [in ATOM] is because the popular saying "People are alive as long as they are remembered" really hits home with me for some reason and I want to prolong the lives of things I like through it.

Binky AOD is something of a refutation of the Fury Road / Fallout vision of the apocalypse as something that will bring about a bright new world in which rugged frontierfolk will create utopias (after dealing with the trollish remnants of the world that mostly perished in fire); those basically say, "If all the world were reduced to frontier days, the best qualities would emerge from a mix of benevolent men and feisty women to bring about the idealized frontier image of Little House on the Prairie or Giants in the Earth." AOD says, "If all the world were reduced to frontier days, human greed, fear, shortsightedness, seflishness, and clannishness would push us the rest of the way to extinction." The inspiring (?) message of AOD is that you shouldn't think that the reset button can solve the world's problems; you ought to fix and save the world we have.

Classic games journolol, writing about games they don't understand on a platform they don't care about for an audience they despise out of a sense of misplaced superiority. All that because no conventional media company will hire them for their writing.

the reason why 'fallout' is so 'popular' in Russia: It's not really Fallout as a franchise but rather the story of a world that has been destroyed. The one without any sense of direction or substantive replacement for the things that are gone now.

As I see it, it's mostly an unconscious feeling that has to do with USSR's dissolution and Perestroika. 'Russian fallout' is usually a setting soaked in Soviet nostalgia and the signifier of the era past. Usually, nobody is rebuilding anything in it. People are kinda caught in the perpetual state of trance, reliving the realities of the time long gone (agitprop, social realism, the elements of everyday life).

Psychologically, it's a much deeper topic than the western postapoc. For Russia, apocalypse was very much real, and they're still getting over it. It's too early to let the history go and move on. Until then, people are gonna cherish these ruins, an epoch done and gone. While Fallout is a trauma gotten from a threat of nuclear annihilation (hence Fallout's more rational and detached approach), things like ATOM or You Are Empty are the result of a very real trauma, the annihilation of the Soviet world. And since it was not very 'tangible' an annihilation (in the sense that the cultural death is not as tangible as the one caused by nuclear explosions), the consequences are more rooted in culture, art, and the psychology of people that are shaped by said art.

1.) I want a game almost exactly like the old ones. Even all the UI quirks, gameplay, MIDI sound/music and artstyle of that era.

2.) I want a game very sinilar to the old ones, but I’m ok with some modern touches like 3D graphics, better UI, etc.

3.) I want a spirirtual sucessor that captures a lot of the feelz and lore of the old games but expands the gameplay and switches up the formula to not only modernize it but push the boundaries of design as if the series still continued today.

These groups of people have and will always exist. The only difference with kickstarter is that all three will have given money in advance for the thing they want. So naturally you’re going to get butthurt no matter what.

Conservative [game] industry abandons old shit on the road all the time, when they feel that good parts of it are not worth the effort. Then kickstarters try to play nostalgia card and revive it, yet the things just crumble in their hands into a dust as if people never understood why these things worked

Yeat at the same time, people who do understand why these things worked manage to make them spring to life because they loved them for reals and have real passion.

Understand this, the Dark Side's true power is not in that it allowed Palpatine to hide his presence while holding regular meetings with the Jedi High Council. It lies in the fact that it allowed him to maintain his composure and not laugh in their faces.

Ok guys, fun's over. This topic is getting too heated and people are clearly divulging information not intended for us. As a site, we have a duty to uphold good relations with developers so that we can all work together and have the kind of fun games that we all...

Oh wait, this is the Codex. Sorry, forgot for a minute there. Thought this was NeoGaf or something for a minute.

We're all struggling in the same tar-pit, we're all tar-splattered, and we'll probably all sink, but we have no hope at all unless we spend our energies helping ourselves and others rather than shoving each other down deeper.

[anti-colonial and Communist] revolutions tend to end in disaster for the people and the land irrespective of the moral justification at the outset because the skillset needed to throw off a more powerful oppressor is almost entirely different from, and even exclusive of, the skillset needed to build a political order.

Some of us actually like their hobbies and enjoy good games - including the challenge on the way - not just completing them like addicted junkies who just want to +1 their prestigious gaming experience. The Void was made to be enjoyed, and I enjoyed it the first three times even though I failed miserably until I actually learned how to play. Learning is part of the fun in this game, just like in many others. Do you also bitch how shit Dwarf Fortress is because you didn't win the game when you tried? Or that you didn't finish Crusader Kings 2 because not only you did not manage to conquer the whole world and convert everyone, but also you were thrown to prison, and died?

If people like their games casual and easy, fine, I can understand not everyone likes challenge. However, when you say something like "Games are meant to be finished" telling others their ways of enjoyment are wrong and games should be done to YOUR liking, because you are the only one who gets it right, then you are an idiot. I played D:OS three times but never actually finished it - even though the first time I reached the end boss. End fight was boring shit, so I just stopped playing. I could finish the game within 15 minutes, but it stopped being fun and I just stopped. Games are not meant to be finished, not for me at least, games are meant to be enjoyed.

The best game writers, like Avellone, know how to leverage the medium to maximize the benefits of agency and complicity

Click to expand...

MRY, from http://www.cshpicone.com/interview-mark-and-vince:
the question with an RPG system – whether it’s inventory management, item variety, crafting, resting, whatever – is whether it gives the player interesting, meaningful, and enjoyable ways to engage with the game. If a mechanic doesn’t, if it only feeds player mania or encourages degenerate play styles (like rest-pre-buff-fight crawling, save-scumming, paper shuffling, shuttling back and forth from town, etc.), it shouldn’t be in the game

all the games that are given as examples and considered well-written by most people on the Codex are games which had just one auteur primarily responsible. PST is recognized as MCAs baby, AoD is VDs baby, Betrayal at Krondor is Hallfords, Geneforge is Vogels, and so on. And I doubt any those guys had professional editors nor did they need them. Much more important seems to me a clear vision for the game as a whole.
[...]
the tl;dr of this post is probably 'too many cooks'.

Coming up with a game that has a clear and consistent vision behind it appears to require either a strong guiding hand of a singular mind or it requires some extremely tight (and perhaps improbable) level of collaboration and converging creative ideas. The former might be impossible today for anything beyond smaller indie games, the latter must be incredibly difficult and thus incredibly rare.

I think the conventional answer is to say that the question ["What's a RPG"] can't be answered in the abstract because it would prejudge the issue should it arise in an actual case or controversy, which naturally would have to be evaluated on its own particular facts. Then when pressed on whether an already-released game is an RPG, I would insist on answering "under established usages." "IGN would call that an RPG, Mr. Senator." "But would you?" "I'm afraid I haven't played it sufficiently to form my own opinion."

By placing the development of the law over a millennium of problems and solutions and solutions to the problems created by the solutions (and cultural and social changes creating new problems addressed with repurposed old solutions amidst the intersection of multiple dispute resolution traditions [civil/anglo-saxon/danelaw]), it really humanized the idiosyncracies and helped me to see the law as a human achievement iterated over generations, like a city or a religion, representing the compromise of a million different perspectives rather than as a failed attempt at perfect organization (a paradigm which I think or project is at the heart of most cynicism about the law).

I find it amusing how many "Anarchists" are employed in often stable, secure jobs. I'm sure there's no connection whatsoever

Click to expand...

99% = Angry at their parents who just want/ed them to work hard and enjoy life. (Grandparents probably escaped from oppression too )

Click to expand...

I once read an article of how Russian punk music is low on talking about the greatness of anarchy vs western punk music and the author speculated that it was due to collapse of the soviet union and the period thereafter and the experience of real anarchy, not sure whether there's any truth to it, but yeah, most anarchists strike me as hilarious naive or just stupid

'Hell, I heard about guys picking up little twelve year old girls on chat rooms. If they can get little girls to meet them in real life just from a chat room, you better believe we'll be able to sell speakers.'

1) The game will contain somewhat more "woke" content than, let's say, The Outer Worlds.
2) It still won't have enough of it to come across as an "SJW game". Few big budget productions are dumb enough to actually go all the way.
3) The people who obsess about such things will fixate on some particular example for a while, then move on.
4) At the end of the day, when people look back at the game and talk about its flaws, the SJW stuff won't be high up on their list of complaints. (See also: BattleTech)
I suppose there is a chance that this game could go full Sweden ala Wolfenstein: The New Colossus, but I don't think that's Paradox's style. They didn't get where they are today by being reckless.

Click to expand...

What worries me is not 1) from your list or the projected consequences you list in 2) 3) and 4), to me it's not a matter of what they add to pander certain people, it's about the interesting and fun ideas that will be filtered out to avoid offending anyone.

Which is bound to happen. Not enough to affect overall quality? Maybe. Hopefully. I suspect we've reached a stage where anybody writing content for any media exerts self-censorship to stay out of trouble , to some degree even not consciously, so it's hard to say why the end result is the way it is.

If there's a common thread to the SJW, it's 'socialism minus class-consciousness'. If you had to sum it up, it's the theory that Michelle Obama is more oppressed than the straight white man that empties her trash can.

Click to expand...

MRY, from https://v1.escapistmagazine.com/art.../issues/issue_100/554-A-Childhood-in-Hyrule.3
designers and players whose formative experience with roleplaying games is Baldur's Gate (or worse, Final Fantasy), not a tabletop adventure, will see the genre in a totally different light than did the designers who made those games in the first place. The designers of early computer roleplaying games drew from memories of collaborative storytelling with friends. They failed to mirror that experience in computer games, and as a result players and designers relying on those games for inspiration have come to think of RPGs as fantasy cartoons wrapped around random numbers.

Welcome to most of the CYOAs here. If you want some finished CYOAs, check Epic and Legend in my signature.

Click to expand...

The unfinished CYOA is not the problem, it's removing all the updates that were already written. But thanks anyway, I'm pretty sure I landed on this thread from your signature.

Click to expand...

Ah, my bad. I thought that thread was named something else. Yeah, it seems root nuked his account. Sucks. But he's probably smart to do eventually so considering the stuff we get up to here.

I broke the link in my sig to prevent further disapoint. A sad day.

"We’re going to try and make you into a… kkk kkzzh masterpiece." ~ The Voices, Epic
"Man Tiger Pig is mysterious in his ways. He comes and goes like the wind, sometimes as a man, at other times a pig, even occasionally a tiger." ~ Jing, Legend"How they scurry, these humans. They that are archons of the sublunar realm die as any other." ~ The Druj, Dirge
“The touch of the dead eats away at both body and mind.” ~ Unknown Number, Spiral
“No, that wing… that shining halo… it is not a demon,” gasps a mage. “It’s a… it’s a Carnage Pigeon!” ~ High Mage, Overlord
"YOU ARE DEATH. REDEMPTION IS NOT FOR YOU TO FIND." ~ The Occupant Of The Golden Throne, Emperor of Nothing [40k CYOA]

DarkUnderlord is there any way we can restore the posts in this thread? It was a p quality CYOA.

"We’re going to try and make you into a… kkk kkzzh masterpiece." ~ The Voices, Epic
"Man Tiger Pig is mysterious in his ways. He comes and goes like the wind, sometimes as a man, at other times a pig, even occasionally a tiger." ~ Jing, Legend"How they scurry, these humans. They that are archons of the sublunar realm die as any other." ~ The Druj, Dirge
“The touch of the dead eats away at both body and mind.” ~ Unknown Number, Spiral
“No, that wing… that shining halo… it is not a demon,” gasps a mage. “It’s a… it’s a Carnage Pigeon!” ~ High Mage, Overlord
"YOU ARE DEATH. REDEMPTION IS NOT FOR YOU TO FIND." ~ The Occupant Of The Golden Throne, Emperor of Nothing [40k CYOA]

The only actual reason I'm putting in those obscure references (disregarding the times I do it completely subconsciously) [in ATOM] is because the popular saying "People are alive as long as they are remembered" really hits home with me for some reason and I want to prolong the lives of things I like through it.

Binky AOD is something of a refutation of the Fury Road / Fallout vision of the apocalypse as something that will bring about a bright new world in which rugged frontierfolk will create utopias (after dealing with the trollish remnants of the world that mostly perished in fire); those basically say, "If all the world were reduced to frontier days, the best qualities would emerge from a mix of benevolent men and feisty women to bring about the idealized frontier image of Little House on the Prairie or Giants in the Earth." AOD says, "If all the world were reduced to frontier days, human greed, fear, shortsightedness, seflishness, and clannishness would push us the rest of the way to extinction." The inspiring (?) message of AOD is that you shouldn't think that the reset button can solve the world's problems; you ought to fix and save the world we have.

Classic games journolol, writing about games they don't understand on a platform they don't care about for an audience they despise out of a sense of misplaced superiority. All that because no conventional media company will hire them for their writing.

the reason why 'fallout' is so 'popular' in Russia: It's not really Fallout as a franchise but rather the story of a world that has been destroyed. The one without any sense of direction or substantive replacement for the things that are gone now.

As I see it, it's mostly an unconscious feeling that has to do with USSR's dissolution and Perestroika. 'Russian fallout' is usually a setting soaked in Soviet nostalgia and the signifier of the era past. Usually, nobody is rebuilding anything in it. People are kinda caught in the perpetual state of trance, reliving the realities of the time long gone (agitprop, social realism, the elements of everyday life).

Psychologically, it's a much deeper topic than the western postapoc. For Russia, apocalypse was very much real, and they're still getting over it. It's too early to let the history go and move on. Until then, people are gonna cherish these ruins, an epoch done and gone. While Fallout is a trauma gotten from a threat of nuclear annihilation (hence Fallout's more rational and detached approach), things like ATOM or You Are Empty are the result of a very real trauma, the annihilation of the Soviet world. And since it was not very 'tangible' an annihilation (in the sense that the cultural death is not as tangible as the one caused by nuclear explosions), the consequences are more rooted in culture, art, and the psychology of people that are shaped by said art.

1.) I want a game almost exactly like the old ones. Even all the UI quirks, gameplay, MIDI sound/music and artstyle of that era.

2.) I want a game very sinilar to the old ones, but I’m ok with some modern touches like 3D graphics, better UI, etc.

3.) I want a spirirtual sucessor that captures a lot of the feelz and lore of the old games but expands the gameplay and switches up the formula to not only modernize it but push the boundaries of design as if the series still continued today.

These groups of people have and will always exist. The only difference with kickstarter is that all three will have given money in advance for the thing they want. So naturally you’re going to get butthurt no matter what.

Conservative [game] industry abandons old shit on the road all the time, when they feel that good parts of it are not worth the effort. Then kickstarters try to play nostalgia card and revive it, yet the things just crumble in their hands into a dust as if people never understood why these things worked

Yeat at the same time, people who do understand why these things worked manage to make them spring to life because they loved them for reals and have real passion.

Understand this, the Dark Side's true power is not in that it allowed Palpatine to hide his presence while holding regular meetings with the Jedi High Council. It lies in the fact that it allowed him to maintain his composure and not laugh in their faces.

Ok guys, fun's over. This topic is getting too heated and people are clearly divulging information not intended for us. As a site, we have a duty to uphold good relations with developers so that we can all work together and have the kind of fun games that we all...

Oh wait, this is the Codex. Sorry, forgot for a minute there. Thought this was NeoGaf or something for a minute.

We're all struggling in the same tar-pit, we're all tar-splattered, and we'll probably all sink, but we have no hope at all unless we spend our energies helping ourselves and others rather than shoving each other down deeper.

[anti-colonial and Communist] revolutions tend to end in disaster for the people and the land irrespective of the moral justification at the outset because the skillset needed to throw off a more powerful oppressor is almost entirely different from, and even exclusive of, the skillset needed to build a political order.

Some of us actually like their hobbies and enjoy good games - including the challenge on the way - not just completing them like addicted junkies who just want to +1 their prestigious gaming experience. The Void was made to be enjoyed, and I enjoyed it the first three times even though I failed miserably until I actually learned how to play. Learning is part of the fun in this game, just like in many others. Do you also bitch how shit Dwarf Fortress is because you didn't win the game when you tried? Or that you didn't finish Crusader Kings 2 because not only you did not manage to conquer the whole world and convert everyone, but also you were thrown to prison, and died?

If people like their games casual and easy, fine, I can understand not everyone likes challenge. However, when you say something like "Games are meant to be finished" telling others their ways of enjoyment are wrong and games should be done to YOUR liking, because you are the only one who gets it right, then you are an idiot. I played D:OS three times but never actually finished it - even though the first time I reached the end boss. End fight was boring shit, so I just stopped playing. I could finish the game within 15 minutes, but it stopped being fun and I just stopped. Games are not meant to be finished, not for me at least, games are meant to be enjoyed.

The best game writers, like Avellone, know how to leverage the medium to maximize the benefits of agency and complicity

Click to expand...

MRY, from http://www.cshpicone.com/interview-mark-and-vince:
the question with an RPG system – whether it’s inventory management, item variety, crafting, resting, whatever – is whether it gives the player interesting, meaningful, and enjoyable ways to engage with the game. If a mechanic doesn’t, if it only feeds player mania or encourages degenerate play styles (like rest-pre-buff-fight crawling, save-scumming, paper shuffling, shuttling back and forth from town, etc.), it shouldn’t be in the game

all the games that are given as examples and considered well-written by most people on the Codex are games which had just one auteur primarily responsible. PST is recognized as MCAs baby, AoD is VDs baby, Betrayal at Krondor is Hallfords, Geneforge is Vogels, and so on. And I doubt any those guys had professional editors nor did they need them. Much more important seems to me a clear vision for the game as a whole.
[...]
the tl;dr of this post is probably 'too many cooks'.

Coming up with a game that has a clear and consistent vision behind it appears to require either a strong guiding hand of a singular mind or it requires some extremely tight (and perhaps improbable) level of collaboration and converging creative ideas. The former might be impossible today for anything beyond smaller indie games, the latter must be incredibly difficult and thus incredibly rare.

I think the conventional answer is to say that the question ["What's a RPG"] can't be answered in the abstract because it would prejudge the issue should it arise in an actual case or controversy, which naturally would have to be evaluated on its own particular facts. Then when pressed on whether an already-released game is an RPG, I would insist on answering "under established usages." "IGN would call that an RPG, Mr. Senator." "But would you?" "I'm afraid I haven't played it sufficiently to form my own opinion."

By placing the development of the law over a millennium of problems and solutions and solutions to the problems created by the solutions (and cultural and social changes creating new problems addressed with repurposed old solutions amidst the intersection of multiple dispute resolution traditions [civil/anglo-saxon/danelaw]), it really humanized the idiosyncracies and helped me to see the law as a human achievement iterated over generations, like a city or a religion, representing the compromise of a million different perspectives rather than as a failed attempt at perfect organization (a paradigm which I think or project is at the heart of most cynicism about the law).

I find it amusing how many "Anarchists" are employed in often stable, secure jobs. I'm sure there's no connection whatsoever

Click to expand...

99% = Angry at their parents who just want/ed them to work hard and enjoy life. (Grandparents probably escaped from oppression too )

Click to expand...

I once read an article of how Russian punk music is low on talking about the greatness of anarchy vs western punk music and the author speculated that it was due to collapse of the soviet union and the period thereafter and the experience of real anarchy, not sure whether there's any truth to it, but yeah, most anarchists strike me as hilarious naive or just stupid

'Hell, I heard about guys picking up little twelve year old girls on chat rooms. If they can get little girls to meet them in real life just from a chat room, you better believe we'll be able to sell speakers.'

1) The game will contain somewhat more "woke" content than, let's say, The Outer Worlds.
2) It still won't have enough of it to come across as an "SJW game". Few big budget productions are dumb enough to actually go all the way.
3) The people who obsess about such things will fixate on some particular example for a while, then move on.
4) At the end of the day, when people look back at the game and talk about its flaws, the SJW stuff won't be high up on their list of complaints. (See also: BattleTech)
I suppose there is a chance that this game could go full Sweden ala Wolfenstein: The New Colossus, but I don't think that's Paradox's style. They didn't get where they are today by being reckless.

Click to expand...

What worries me is not 1) from your list or the projected consequences you list in 2) 3) and 4), to me it's not a matter of what they add to pander certain people, it's about the interesting and fun ideas that will be filtered out to avoid offending anyone.

Which is bound to happen. Not enough to affect overall quality? Maybe. Hopefully. I suspect we've reached a stage where anybody writing content for any media exerts self-censorship to stay out of trouble , to some degree even not consciously, so it's hard to say why the end result is the way it is.

If there's a common thread to the SJW, it's 'socialism minus class-consciousness'. If you had to sum it up, it's the theory that Michelle Obama is more oppressed than the straight white man that empties her trash can.

Click to expand...

MRY, from https://v1.escapistmagazine.com/art.../issues/issue_100/554-A-Childhood-in-Hyrule.3
designers and players whose formative experience with roleplaying games is Baldur's Gate (or worse, Final Fantasy), not a tabletop adventure, will see the genre in a totally different light than did the designers who made those games in the first place. The designers of early computer roleplaying games drew from memories of collaborative storytelling with friends. They failed to mirror that experience in computer games, and as a result players and designers relying on those games for inspiration have come to think of RPGs as fantasy cartoons wrapped around random numbers.

A sad day indeed. And I think it's pretty recent too, from this year at least. I know I should have read it earlier!

Click to expand...

Yeah, it was root's best work, imo. I hadn't read all his lp's, but this is the one that really grabbed me.

"We’re going to try and make you into a… kkk kkzzh masterpiece." ~ The Voices, Epic
"Man Tiger Pig is mysterious in his ways. He comes and goes like the wind, sometimes as a man, at other times a pig, even occasionally a tiger." ~ Jing, Legend"How they scurry, these humans. They that are archons of the sublunar realm die as any other." ~ The Druj, Dirge
“The touch of the dead eats away at both body and mind.” ~ Unknown Number, Spiral
“No, that wing… that shining halo… it is not a demon,” gasps a mage. “It’s a… it’s a Carnage Pigeon!” ~ High Mage, Overlord
"YOU ARE DEATH. REDEMPTION IS NOT FOR YOU TO FIND." ~ The Occupant Of The Golden Throne, Emperor of Nothing [40k CYOA]

The only actual reason I'm putting in those obscure references (disregarding the times I do it completely subconsciously) [in ATOM] is because the popular saying "People are alive as long as they are remembered" really hits home with me for some reason and I want to prolong the lives of things I like through it.

Binky AOD is something of a refutation of the Fury Road / Fallout vision of the apocalypse as something that will bring about a bright new world in which rugged frontierfolk will create utopias (after dealing with the trollish remnants of the world that mostly perished in fire); those basically say, "If all the world were reduced to frontier days, the best qualities would emerge from a mix of benevolent men and feisty women to bring about the idealized frontier image of Little House on the Prairie or Giants in the Earth." AOD says, "If all the world were reduced to frontier days, human greed, fear, shortsightedness, seflishness, and clannishness would push us the rest of the way to extinction." The inspiring (?) message of AOD is that you shouldn't think that the reset button can solve the world's problems; you ought to fix and save the world we have.

Classic games journolol, writing about games they don't understand on a platform they don't care about for an audience they despise out of a sense of misplaced superiority. All that because no conventional media company will hire them for their writing.

the reason why 'fallout' is so 'popular' in Russia: It's not really Fallout as a franchise but rather the story of a world that has been destroyed. The one without any sense of direction or substantive replacement for the things that are gone now.

As I see it, it's mostly an unconscious feeling that has to do with USSR's dissolution and Perestroika. 'Russian fallout' is usually a setting soaked in Soviet nostalgia and the signifier of the era past. Usually, nobody is rebuilding anything in it. People are kinda caught in the perpetual state of trance, reliving the realities of the time long gone (agitprop, social realism, the elements of everyday life).

Psychologically, it's a much deeper topic than the western postapoc. For Russia, apocalypse was very much real, and they're still getting over it. It's too early to let the history go and move on. Until then, people are gonna cherish these ruins, an epoch done and gone. While Fallout is a trauma gotten from a threat of nuclear annihilation (hence Fallout's more rational and detached approach), things like ATOM or You Are Empty are the result of a very real trauma, the annihilation of the Soviet world. And since it was not very 'tangible' an annihilation (in the sense that the cultural death is not as tangible as the one caused by nuclear explosions), the consequences are more rooted in culture, art, and the psychology of people that are shaped by said art.

1.) I want a game almost exactly like the old ones. Even all the UI quirks, gameplay, MIDI sound/music and artstyle of that era.

2.) I want a game very sinilar to the old ones, but I’m ok with some modern touches like 3D graphics, better UI, etc.

3.) I want a spirirtual sucessor that captures a lot of the feelz and lore of the old games but expands the gameplay and switches up the formula to not only modernize it but push the boundaries of design as if the series still continued today.

These groups of people have and will always exist. The only difference with kickstarter is that all three will have given money in advance for the thing they want. So naturally you’re going to get butthurt no matter what.

Conservative [game] industry abandons old shit on the road all the time, when they feel that good parts of it are not worth the effort. Then kickstarters try to play nostalgia card and revive it, yet the things just crumble in their hands into a dust as if people never understood why these things worked

Yeat at the same time, people who do understand why these things worked manage to make them spring to life because they loved them for reals and have real passion.

Understand this, the Dark Side's true power is not in that it allowed Palpatine to hide his presence while holding regular meetings with the Jedi High Council. It lies in the fact that it allowed him to maintain his composure and not laugh in their faces.

Ok guys, fun's over. This topic is getting too heated and people are clearly divulging information not intended for us. As a site, we have a duty to uphold good relations with developers so that we can all work together and have the kind of fun games that we all...

Oh wait, this is the Codex. Sorry, forgot for a minute there. Thought this was NeoGaf or something for a minute.

We're all struggling in the same tar-pit, we're all tar-splattered, and we'll probably all sink, but we have no hope at all unless we spend our energies helping ourselves and others rather than shoving each other down deeper.

[anti-colonial and Communist] revolutions tend to end in disaster for the people and the land irrespective of the moral justification at the outset because the skillset needed to throw off a more powerful oppressor is almost entirely different from, and even exclusive of, the skillset needed to build a political order.

Some of us actually like their hobbies and enjoy good games - including the challenge on the way - not just completing them like addicted junkies who just want to +1 their prestigious gaming experience. The Void was made to be enjoyed, and I enjoyed it the first three times even though I failed miserably until I actually learned how to play. Learning is part of the fun in this game, just like in many others. Do you also bitch how shit Dwarf Fortress is because you didn't win the game when you tried? Or that you didn't finish Crusader Kings 2 because not only you did not manage to conquer the whole world and convert everyone, but also you were thrown to prison, and died?

If people like their games casual and easy, fine, I can understand not everyone likes challenge. However, when you say something like "Games are meant to be finished" telling others their ways of enjoyment are wrong and games should be done to YOUR liking, because you are the only one who gets it right, then you are an idiot. I played D:OS three times but never actually finished it - even though the first time I reached the end boss. End fight was boring shit, so I just stopped playing. I could finish the game within 15 minutes, but it stopped being fun and I just stopped. Games are not meant to be finished, not for me at least, games are meant to be enjoyed.

The best game writers, like Avellone, know how to leverage the medium to maximize the benefits of agency and complicity

Click to expand...

MRY, from http://www.cshpicone.com/interview-mark-and-vince:
the question with an RPG system – whether it’s inventory management, item variety, crafting, resting, whatever – is whether it gives the player interesting, meaningful, and enjoyable ways to engage with the game. If a mechanic doesn’t, if it only feeds player mania or encourages degenerate play styles (like rest-pre-buff-fight crawling, save-scumming, paper shuffling, shuttling back and forth from town, etc.), it shouldn’t be in the game

all the games that are given as examples and considered well-written by most people on the Codex are games which had just one auteur primarily responsible. PST is recognized as MCAs baby, AoD is VDs baby, Betrayal at Krondor is Hallfords, Geneforge is Vogels, and so on. And I doubt any those guys had professional editors nor did they need them. Much more important seems to me a clear vision for the game as a whole.
[...]
the tl;dr of this post is probably 'too many cooks'.

Coming up with a game that has a clear and consistent vision behind it appears to require either a strong guiding hand of a singular mind or it requires some extremely tight (and perhaps improbable) level of collaboration and converging creative ideas. The former might be impossible today for anything beyond smaller indie games, the latter must be incredibly difficult and thus incredibly rare.

I think the conventional answer is to say that the question ["What's a RPG"] can't be answered in the abstract because it would prejudge the issue should it arise in an actual case or controversy, which naturally would have to be evaluated on its own particular facts. Then when pressed on whether an already-released game is an RPG, I would insist on answering "under established usages." "IGN would call that an RPG, Mr. Senator." "But would you?" "I'm afraid I haven't played it sufficiently to form my own opinion."

By placing the development of the law over a millennium of problems and solutions and solutions to the problems created by the solutions (and cultural and social changes creating new problems addressed with repurposed old solutions amidst the intersection of multiple dispute resolution traditions [civil/anglo-saxon/danelaw]), it really humanized the idiosyncracies and helped me to see the law as a human achievement iterated over generations, like a city or a religion, representing the compromise of a million different perspectives rather than as a failed attempt at perfect organization (a paradigm which I think or project is at the heart of most cynicism about the law).

I find it amusing how many "Anarchists" are employed in often stable, secure jobs. I'm sure there's no connection whatsoever

Click to expand...

99% = Angry at their parents who just want/ed them to work hard and enjoy life. (Grandparents probably escaped from oppression too )

Click to expand...

I once read an article of how Russian punk music is low on talking about the greatness of anarchy vs western punk music and the author speculated that it was due to collapse of the soviet union and the period thereafter and the experience of real anarchy, not sure whether there's any truth to it, but yeah, most anarchists strike me as hilarious naive or just stupid

'Hell, I heard about guys picking up little twelve year old girls on chat rooms. If they can get little girls to meet them in real life just from a chat room, you better believe we'll be able to sell speakers.'

1) The game will contain somewhat more "woke" content than, let's say, The Outer Worlds.
2) It still won't have enough of it to come across as an "SJW game". Few big budget productions are dumb enough to actually go all the way.
3) The people who obsess about such things will fixate on some particular example for a while, then move on.
4) At the end of the day, when people look back at the game and talk about its flaws, the SJW stuff won't be high up on their list of complaints. (See also: BattleTech)
I suppose there is a chance that this game could go full Sweden ala Wolfenstein: The New Colossus, but I don't think that's Paradox's style. They didn't get where they are today by being reckless.

Click to expand...

What worries me is not 1) from your list or the projected consequences you list in 2) 3) and 4), to me it's not a matter of what they add to pander certain people, it's about the interesting and fun ideas that will be filtered out to avoid offending anyone.

Which is bound to happen. Not enough to affect overall quality? Maybe. Hopefully. I suspect we've reached a stage where anybody writing content for any media exerts self-censorship to stay out of trouble , to some degree even not consciously, so it's hard to say why the end result is the way it is.

If there's a common thread to the SJW, it's 'socialism minus class-consciousness'. If you had to sum it up, it's the theory that Michelle Obama is more oppressed than the straight white man that empties her trash can.

Click to expand...

MRY, from https://v1.escapistmagazine.com/art.../issues/issue_100/554-A-Childhood-in-Hyrule.3
designers and players whose formative experience with roleplaying games is Baldur's Gate (or worse, Final Fantasy), not a tabletop adventure, will see the genre in a totally different light than did the designers who made those games in the first place. The designers of early computer roleplaying games drew from memories of collaborative storytelling with friends. They failed to mirror that experience in computer games, and as a result players and designers relying on those games for inspiration have come to think of RPGs as fantasy cartoons wrapped around random numbers.

Sad. Since root and treave stopped posting, this subforum pretty much died.

Actually, since becoming a subforum, COYAs around here in general pretty much died.

"We’re going to try and make you into a… kkk kkzzh masterpiece." ~ The Voices, Epic
"Man Tiger Pig is mysterious in his ways. He comes and goes like the wind, sometimes as a man, at other times a pig, even occasionally a tiger." ~ Jing, Legend"How they scurry, these humans. They that are archons of the sublunar realm die as any other." ~ The Druj, Dirge
“The touch of the dead eats away at both body and mind.” ~ Unknown Number, Spiral
“No, that wing… that shining halo… it is not a demon,” gasps a mage. “It’s a… it’s a Carnage Pigeon!” ~ High Mage, Overlord
"YOU ARE DEATH. REDEMPTION IS NOT FOR YOU TO FIND." ~ The Occupant Of The Golden Throne, Emperor of Nothing [40k CYOA]

The only actual reason I'm putting in those obscure references (disregarding the times I do it completely subconsciously) [in ATOM] is because the popular saying "People are alive as long as they are remembered" really hits home with me for some reason and I want to prolong the lives of things I like through it.

Binky AOD is something of a refutation of the Fury Road / Fallout vision of the apocalypse as something that will bring about a bright new world in which rugged frontierfolk will create utopias (after dealing with the trollish remnants of the world that mostly perished in fire); those basically say, "If all the world were reduced to frontier days, the best qualities would emerge from a mix of benevolent men and feisty women to bring about the idealized frontier image of Little House on the Prairie or Giants in the Earth." AOD says, "If all the world were reduced to frontier days, human greed, fear, shortsightedness, seflishness, and clannishness would push us the rest of the way to extinction." The inspiring (?) message of AOD is that you shouldn't think that the reset button can solve the world's problems; you ought to fix and save the world we have.

Classic games journolol, writing about games they don't understand on a platform they don't care about for an audience they despise out of a sense of misplaced superiority. All that because no conventional media company will hire them for their writing.

the reason why 'fallout' is so 'popular' in Russia: It's not really Fallout as a franchise but rather the story of a world that has been destroyed. The one without any sense of direction or substantive replacement for the things that are gone now.

As I see it, it's mostly an unconscious feeling that has to do with USSR's dissolution and Perestroika. 'Russian fallout' is usually a setting soaked in Soviet nostalgia and the signifier of the era past. Usually, nobody is rebuilding anything in it. People are kinda caught in the perpetual state of trance, reliving the realities of the time long gone (agitprop, social realism, the elements of everyday life).

Psychologically, it's a much deeper topic than the western postapoc. For Russia, apocalypse was very much real, and they're still getting over it. It's too early to let the history go and move on. Until then, people are gonna cherish these ruins, an epoch done and gone. While Fallout is a trauma gotten from a threat of nuclear annihilation (hence Fallout's more rational and detached approach), things like ATOM or You Are Empty are the result of a very real trauma, the annihilation of the Soviet world. And since it was not very 'tangible' an annihilation (in the sense that the cultural death is not as tangible as the one caused by nuclear explosions), the consequences are more rooted in culture, art, and the psychology of people that are shaped by said art.

1.) I want a game almost exactly like the old ones. Even all the UI quirks, gameplay, MIDI sound/music and artstyle of that era.

2.) I want a game very sinilar to the old ones, but I’m ok with some modern touches like 3D graphics, better UI, etc.

3.) I want a spirirtual sucessor that captures a lot of the feelz and lore of the old games but expands the gameplay and switches up the formula to not only modernize it but push the boundaries of design as if the series still continued today.

These groups of people have and will always exist. The only difference with kickstarter is that all three will have given money in advance for the thing they want. So naturally you’re going to get butthurt no matter what.

Conservative [game] industry abandons old shit on the road all the time, when they feel that good parts of it are not worth the effort. Then kickstarters try to play nostalgia card and revive it, yet the things just crumble in their hands into a dust as if people never understood why these things worked

Yeat at the same time, people who do understand why these things worked manage to make them spring to life because they loved them for reals and have real passion.

Understand this, the Dark Side's true power is not in that it allowed Palpatine to hide his presence while holding regular meetings with the Jedi High Council. It lies in the fact that it allowed him to maintain his composure and not laugh in their faces.

Ok guys, fun's over. This topic is getting too heated and people are clearly divulging information not intended for us. As a site, we have a duty to uphold good relations with developers so that we can all work together and have the kind of fun games that we all...

Oh wait, this is the Codex. Sorry, forgot for a minute there. Thought this was NeoGaf or something for a minute.

We're all struggling in the same tar-pit, we're all tar-splattered, and we'll probably all sink, but we have no hope at all unless we spend our energies helping ourselves and others rather than shoving each other down deeper.

[anti-colonial and Communist] revolutions tend to end in disaster for the people and the land irrespective of the moral justification at the outset because the skillset needed to throw off a more powerful oppressor is almost entirely different from, and even exclusive of, the skillset needed to build a political order.

Some of us actually like their hobbies and enjoy good games - including the challenge on the way - not just completing them like addicted junkies who just want to +1 their prestigious gaming experience. The Void was made to be enjoyed, and I enjoyed it the first three times even though I failed miserably until I actually learned how to play. Learning is part of the fun in this game, just like in many others. Do you also bitch how shit Dwarf Fortress is because you didn't win the game when you tried? Or that you didn't finish Crusader Kings 2 because not only you did not manage to conquer the whole world and convert everyone, but also you were thrown to prison, and died?

If people like their games casual and easy, fine, I can understand not everyone likes challenge. However, when you say something like "Games are meant to be finished" telling others their ways of enjoyment are wrong and games should be done to YOUR liking, because you are the only one who gets it right, then you are an idiot. I played D:OS three times but never actually finished it - even though the first time I reached the end boss. End fight was boring shit, so I just stopped playing. I could finish the game within 15 minutes, but it stopped being fun and I just stopped. Games are not meant to be finished, not for me at least, games are meant to be enjoyed.

The best game writers, like Avellone, know how to leverage the medium to maximize the benefits of agency and complicity

Click to expand...

MRY, from http://www.cshpicone.com/interview-mark-and-vince:
the question with an RPG system – whether it’s inventory management, item variety, crafting, resting, whatever – is whether it gives the player interesting, meaningful, and enjoyable ways to engage with the game. If a mechanic doesn’t, if it only feeds player mania or encourages degenerate play styles (like rest-pre-buff-fight crawling, save-scumming, paper shuffling, shuttling back and forth from town, etc.), it shouldn’t be in the game

all the games that are given as examples and considered well-written by most people on the Codex are games which had just one auteur primarily responsible. PST is recognized as MCAs baby, AoD is VDs baby, Betrayal at Krondor is Hallfords, Geneforge is Vogels, and so on. And I doubt any those guys had professional editors nor did they need them. Much more important seems to me a clear vision for the game as a whole.
[...]
the tl;dr of this post is probably 'too many cooks'.

Coming up with a game that has a clear and consistent vision behind it appears to require either a strong guiding hand of a singular mind or it requires some extremely tight (and perhaps improbable) level of collaboration and converging creative ideas. The former might be impossible today for anything beyond smaller indie games, the latter must be incredibly difficult and thus incredibly rare.

I think the conventional answer is to say that the question ["What's a RPG"] can't be answered in the abstract because it would prejudge the issue should it arise in an actual case or controversy, which naturally would have to be evaluated on its own particular facts. Then when pressed on whether an already-released game is an RPG, I would insist on answering "under established usages." "IGN would call that an RPG, Mr. Senator." "But would you?" "I'm afraid I haven't played it sufficiently to form my own opinion."

By placing the development of the law over a millennium of problems and solutions and solutions to the problems created by the solutions (and cultural and social changes creating new problems addressed with repurposed old solutions amidst the intersection of multiple dispute resolution traditions [civil/anglo-saxon/danelaw]), it really humanized the idiosyncracies and helped me to see the law as a human achievement iterated over generations, like a city or a religion, representing the compromise of a million different perspectives rather than as a failed attempt at perfect organization (a paradigm which I think or project is at the heart of most cynicism about the law).

I find it amusing how many "Anarchists" are employed in often stable, secure jobs. I'm sure there's no connection whatsoever

Click to expand...

99% = Angry at their parents who just want/ed them to work hard and enjoy life. (Grandparents probably escaped from oppression too )

Click to expand...

I once read an article of how Russian punk music is low on talking about the greatness of anarchy vs western punk music and the author speculated that it was due to collapse of the soviet union and the period thereafter and the experience of real anarchy, not sure whether there's any truth to it, but yeah, most anarchists strike me as hilarious naive or just stupid

'Hell, I heard about guys picking up little twelve year old girls on chat rooms. If they can get little girls to meet them in real life just from a chat room, you better believe we'll be able to sell speakers.'

1) The game will contain somewhat more "woke" content than, let's say, The Outer Worlds.
2) It still won't have enough of it to come across as an "SJW game". Few big budget productions are dumb enough to actually go all the way.
3) The people who obsess about such things will fixate on some particular example for a while, then move on.
4) At the end of the day, when people look back at the game and talk about its flaws, the SJW stuff won't be high up on their list of complaints. (See also: BattleTech)
I suppose there is a chance that this game could go full Sweden ala Wolfenstein: The New Colossus, but I don't think that's Paradox's style. They didn't get where they are today by being reckless.

Click to expand...

What worries me is not 1) from your list or the projected consequences you list in 2) 3) and 4), to me it's not a matter of what they add to pander certain people, it's about the interesting and fun ideas that will be filtered out to avoid offending anyone.

Which is bound to happen. Not enough to affect overall quality? Maybe. Hopefully. I suspect we've reached a stage where anybody writing content for any media exerts self-censorship to stay out of trouble , to some degree even not consciously, so it's hard to say why the end result is the way it is.

If there's a common thread to the SJW, it's 'socialism minus class-consciousness'. If you had to sum it up, it's the theory that Michelle Obama is more oppressed than the straight white man that empties her trash can.

Click to expand...

MRY, from https://v1.escapistmagazine.com/art.../issues/issue_100/554-A-Childhood-in-Hyrule.3
designers and players whose formative experience with roleplaying games is Baldur's Gate (or worse, Final Fantasy), not a tabletop adventure, will see the genre in a totally different light than did the designers who made those games in the first place. The designers of early computer roleplaying games drew from memories of collaborative storytelling with friends. They failed to mirror that experience in computer games, and as a result players and designers relying on those games for inspiration have come to think of RPGs as fantasy cartoons wrapped around random numbers.

The only actual reason I'm putting in those obscure references (disregarding the times I do it completely subconsciously) [in ATOM] is because the popular saying "People are alive as long as they are remembered" really hits home with me for some reason and I want to prolong the lives of things I like through it.

Binky AOD is something of a refutation of the Fury Road / Fallout vision of the apocalypse as something that will bring about a bright new world in which rugged frontierfolk will create utopias (after dealing with the trollish remnants of the world that mostly perished in fire); those basically say, "If all the world were reduced to frontier days, the best qualities would emerge from a mix of benevolent men and feisty women to bring about the idealized frontier image of Little House on the Prairie or Giants in the Earth." AOD says, "If all the world were reduced to frontier days, human greed, fear, shortsightedness, seflishness, and clannishness would push us the rest of the way to extinction." The inspiring (?) message of AOD is that you shouldn't think that the reset button can solve the world's problems; you ought to fix and save the world we have.

Classic games journolol, writing about games they don't understand on a platform they don't care about for an audience they despise out of a sense of misplaced superiority. All that because no conventional media company will hire them for their writing.

the reason why 'fallout' is so 'popular' in Russia: It's not really Fallout as a franchise but rather the story of a world that has been destroyed. The one without any sense of direction or substantive replacement for the things that are gone now.

As I see it, it's mostly an unconscious feeling that has to do with USSR's dissolution and Perestroika. 'Russian fallout' is usually a setting soaked in Soviet nostalgia and the signifier of the era past. Usually, nobody is rebuilding anything in it. People are kinda caught in the perpetual state of trance, reliving the realities of the time long gone (agitprop, social realism, the elements of everyday life).

Psychologically, it's a much deeper topic than the western postapoc. For Russia, apocalypse was very much real, and they're still getting over it. It's too early to let the history go and move on. Until then, people are gonna cherish these ruins, an epoch done and gone. While Fallout is a trauma gotten from a threat of nuclear annihilation (hence Fallout's more rational and detached approach), things like ATOM or You Are Empty are the result of a very real trauma, the annihilation of the Soviet world. And since it was not very 'tangible' an annihilation (in the sense that the cultural death is not as tangible as the one caused by nuclear explosions), the consequences are more rooted in culture, art, and the psychology of people that are shaped by said art.

1.) I want a game almost exactly like the old ones. Even all the UI quirks, gameplay, MIDI sound/music and artstyle of that era.

2.) I want a game very sinilar to the old ones, but I’m ok with some modern touches like 3D graphics, better UI, etc.

3.) I want a spirirtual sucessor that captures a lot of the feelz and lore of the old games but expands the gameplay and switches up the formula to not only modernize it but push the boundaries of design as if the series still continued today.

These groups of people have and will always exist. The only difference with kickstarter is that all three will have given money in advance for the thing they want. So naturally you’re going to get butthurt no matter what.

Conservative [game] industry abandons old shit on the road all the time, when they feel that good parts of it are not worth the effort. Then kickstarters try to play nostalgia card and revive it, yet the things just crumble in their hands into a dust as if people never understood why these things worked

Yeat at the same time, people who do understand why these things worked manage to make them spring to life because they loved them for reals and have real passion.

Understand this, the Dark Side's true power is not in that it allowed Palpatine to hide his presence while holding regular meetings with the Jedi High Council. It lies in the fact that it allowed him to maintain his composure and not laugh in their faces.

Ok guys, fun's over. This topic is getting too heated and people are clearly divulging information not intended for us. As a site, we have a duty to uphold good relations with developers so that we can all work together and have the kind of fun games that we all...

Oh wait, this is the Codex. Sorry, forgot for a minute there. Thought this was NeoGaf or something for a minute.

We're all struggling in the same tar-pit, we're all tar-splattered, and we'll probably all sink, but we have no hope at all unless we spend our energies helping ourselves and others rather than shoving each other down deeper.

[anti-colonial and Communist] revolutions tend to end in disaster for the people and the land irrespective of the moral justification at the outset because the skillset needed to throw off a more powerful oppressor is almost entirely different from, and even exclusive of, the skillset needed to build a political order.

Some of us actually like their hobbies and enjoy good games - including the challenge on the way - not just completing them like addicted junkies who just want to +1 their prestigious gaming experience. The Void was made to be enjoyed, and I enjoyed it the first three times even though I failed miserably until I actually learned how to play. Learning is part of the fun in this game, just like in many others. Do you also bitch how shit Dwarf Fortress is because you didn't win the game when you tried? Or that you didn't finish Crusader Kings 2 because not only you did not manage to conquer the whole world and convert everyone, but also you were thrown to prison, and died?

If people like their games casual and easy, fine, I can understand not everyone likes challenge. However, when you say something like "Games are meant to be finished" telling others their ways of enjoyment are wrong and games should be done to YOUR liking, because you are the only one who gets it right, then you are an idiot. I played D:OS three times but never actually finished it - even though the first time I reached the end boss. End fight was boring shit, so I just stopped playing. I could finish the game within 15 minutes, but it stopped being fun and I just stopped. Games are not meant to be finished, not for me at least, games are meant to be enjoyed.

The best game writers, like Avellone, know how to leverage the medium to maximize the benefits of agency and complicity

Click to expand...

MRY, from http://www.cshpicone.com/interview-mark-and-vince:
the question with an RPG system – whether it’s inventory management, item variety, crafting, resting, whatever – is whether it gives the player interesting, meaningful, and enjoyable ways to engage with the game. If a mechanic doesn’t, if it only feeds player mania or encourages degenerate play styles (like rest-pre-buff-fight crawling, save-scumming, paper shuffling, shuttling back and forth from town, etc.), it shouldn’t be in the game

all the games that are given as examples and considered well-written by most people on the Codex are games which had just one auteur primarily responsible. PST is recognized as MCAs baby, AoD is VDs baby, Betrayal at Krondor is Hallfords, Geneforge is Vogels, and so on. And I doubt any those guys had professional editors nor did they need them. Much more important seems to me a clear vision for the game as a whole.
[...]
the tl;dr of this post is probably 'too many cooks'.

Coming up with a game that has a clear and consistent vision behind it appears to require either a strong guiding hand of a singular mind or it requires some extremely tight (and perhaps improbable) level of collaboration and converging creative ideas. The former might be impossible today for anything beyond smaller indie games, the latter must be incredibly difficult and thus incredibly rare.

I think the conventional answer is to say that the question ["What's a RPG"] can't be answered in the abstract because it would prejudge the issue should it arise in an actual case or controversy, which naturally would have to be evaluated on its own particular facts. Then when pressed on whether an already-released game is an RPG, I would insist on answering "under established usages." "IGN would call that an RPG, Mr. Senator." "But would you?" "I'm afraid I haven't played it sufficiently to form my own opinion."

By placing the development of the law over a millennium of problems and solutions and solutions to the problems created by the solutions (and cultural and social changes creating new problems addressed with repurposed old solutions amidst the intersection of multiple dispute resolution traditions [civil/anglo-saxon/danelaw]), it really humanized the idiosyncracies and helped me to see the law as a human achievement iterated over generations, like a city or a religion, representing the compromise of a million different perspectives rather than as a failed attempt at perfect organization (a paradigm which I think or project is at the heart of most cynicism about the law).

I find it amusing how many "Anarchists" are employed in often stable, secure jobs. I'm sure there's no connection whatsoever

Click to expand...

99% = Angry at their parents who just want/ed them to work hard and enjoy life. (Grandparents probably escaped from oppression too )

Click to expand...

I once read an article of how Russian punk music is low on talking about the greatness of anarchy vs western punk music and the author speculated that it was due to collapse of the soviet union and the period thereafter and the experience of real anarchy, not sure whether there's any truth to it, but yeah, most anarchists strike me as hilarious naive or just stupid

'Hell, I heard about guys picking up little twelve year old girls on chat rooms. If they can get little girls to meet them in real life just from a chat room, you better believe we'll be able to sell speakers.'

1) The game will contain somewhat more "woke" content than, let's say, The Outer Worlds.
2) It still won't have enough of it to come across as an "SJW game". Few big budget productions are dumb enough to actually go all the way.
3) The people who obsess about such things will fixate on some particular example for a while, then move on.
4) At the end of the day, when people look back at the game and talk about its flaws, the SJW stuff won't be high up on their list of complaints. (See also: BattleTech)
I suppose there is a chance that this game could go full Sweden ala Wolfenstein: The New Colossus, but I don't think that's Paradox's style. They didn't get where they are today by being reckless.

Click to expand...

What worries me is not 1) from your list or the projected consequences you list in 2) 3) and 4), to me it's not a matter of what they add to pander certain people, it's about the interesting and fun ideas that will be filtered out to avoid offending anyone.

Which is bound to happen. Not enough to affect overall quality? Maybe. Hopefully. I suspect we've reached a stage where anybody writing content for any media exerts self-censorship to stay out of trouble , to some degree even not consciously, so it's hard to say why the end result is the way it is.

If there's a common thread to the SJW, it's 'socialism minus class-consciousness'. If you had to sum it up, it's the theory that Michelle Obama is more oppressed than the straight white man that empties her trash can.

Click to expand...

MRY, from https://v1.escapistmagazine.com/art.../issues/issue_100/554-A-Childhood-in-Hyrule.3
designers and players whose formative experience with roleplaying games is Baldur's Gate (or worse, Final Fantasy), not a tabletop adventure, will see the genre in a totally different light than did the designers who made those games in the first place. The designers of early computer roleplaying games drew from memories of collaborative storytelling with friends. They failed to mirror that experience in computer games, and as a result players and designers relying on those games for inspiration have come to think of RPGs as fantasy cartoons wrapped around random numbers.

‘Plan? Plan for what? I saw Space Marines beheading Inquisitors in Cadia and charging away from battle, planetary governors becoming soul-devouring abominations…’ Tzeentch paused and let his gaze wander before resuming, with a perplexed voice ‘orks being diplomatic and Chaos making more sense than the Imperium, which was led by a xeno no less. I saw a black crusade succeeding and the Eldar getting things done for once. Did you think I had this kind of trouble with Abaddon? We could always count on him. Reliable, he was.’